Orion Books

The fire was a family tragedy that Jamie can't forget, even in his dreams. And now there is something terrifying happening to him in Crownhill, the village where he's been sent to get over his problems. Something to do with an evil old witch who gets into his nightmares, and a frightened girl, the victim of a long-ago witch hunt, whose presence lingers on. A present-day boy, a seventeenth-century girl, an ancient crone: for a single moment their lives are fused by fire. And as the dark secrets of Crownhill are revealed Jamie has to confront his worst fears in order to free himself from the horrors of the past. Marcus Sedgwick weaves extracts from reports of a seventeenth-century witch hunt into a tense and brilliant novel.

Benjamin Thorpe is married, a father, a successful Los Angeles architect — and a man obsessed. Alone in New York City on business, he spends the empty hours of the night in a compulsive search for female companionship. His dizzying descent leads to an early morning confrontation in a mid-town brothel, and a subsequent searing self-revelation. Cathy Frese — aka Heidi the 'teenage' hooker — finishes up for the night and walks back to her studio apartment. But she never arrives. Her strangled, used and mutilated body is found in an alleyway the next morning. These two lost souls had crossed briefly in the night, and as the foggy events of the night before come into sharper focus, Benjamin Thorpe becomes an ever more possible suspect...

Terry McCaleb's enforced quiet lifestyle on the island of Catalina is a far cry from the hectic excitement of his former role as homicide detective in L.A. However, when a small-time criminal is found dead McCaleb is persuaded to profile the killer. Six years ago the victim had been arrested by Harry Bosch for murder but was later released uncharged. In doing what he does best, reviewing the crime scene tapes and investigative records, McCaleb picks up a clue the sheriffs missed, and discovers that the killer left a message at the crime scene — a message that seems to implicate Detective Harry Bosch... 'A brilliant piece of writing that wrings every bit of emotion from the contrast between the two detectives' Daily Telegraph

The river of Dawkins's title is a river of DNA, flowing through time from the beginning of life on earth to the present — and onwards. Dawkins explains that DNA must be thought of as the most sophisticated information system imaginable: 'Life is just bytes and bytes of information,' he writes. Using this perspective, he describes the mechanisms by which evolution has taken place, gradually but inexorably, over a period of three thousand million years. It is the story of how evolution happens, rather than a narrative of what has actually happened in evolution. He discusses current views on the process of human evolution, including the idea that we all trace back to a comparatively recent African 'Eve', and speculates that the 'information explosion' that was unleashed on Earth when DNA came into being has almost certainly happened in other places in the universe.

In this compelling biography, Christopher Sandford explores the full, inside story of Kurt Cobain. From the disruptive childhood which had such a crucial impact on Cobain's personality to the ambitious career musician who, as a friend said, 'lunged for success', and the worldwide breakthrough of Nirvana's Nevermind, Sandford also writes about Cobain's stormy marriage to Courtney Love, his heroin addiction, and how he became more and more of a recluse. Finally, he writes of the crisis when, in April 1994, Cobain turned a shotgun on himself and became a martyr for disaffected youth. The result is a saga of success and corruption which John Peel has called 'the ultimate rock and roll morality story'.

Conan the Cimmerian: he rose from boy-thief and mercenary to become kingof Aquilonia. Neither supernatural fiends nor demonic sorcery could oppose the barbarian warrior as he wielded his mighty sword and dispatched his enemies to a bloody doom on the battlefields of the legendary Hyborian Age. Collected together for the first time anywhere in the world, in chronological order, are all Robert E. Howard's definitive stories of Conan, exactly as he wrote them, as fresh, atmospheric and vibrant today as when they were first published in the pulp magazines more than sixty years ago.

Recently voted the greatest fantasy of all time, after The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun is an extraordinary epic, set a million years in the future, on an Earth transformed in mysterious and wondrous ways, in a time when our present culture is no longer even a memory. Severian, the central character, is a torturer, exiled from his guild after falling in love with one of his victims, and journeying to the distant city of Thrax, armed with his ancient executioner's sword, Terminus Est. This edition contains the first two volumes of this four volume novel, The Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the Conciliator.

Recently voted the greatest fantasy of all time, after The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun is an extraordinary epic, set a million years in the future, on an Earth transformed in mysterious and wondrous ways, in a time when our present culture is no longer even a memory. Severian, the central character, is a torturer, exiled from his guild after falling in love with one of his victims, and journeying to the distant city of Thrax, armed with his ancient executioner's sword, Terminus Est. This edition contains the second two volumes of this four volume novel, The Sword of the Lictor and The Citadel of the Autarch.

Ross Ransome is at the top of his profession; one of the most successful, and certainly one of the richest, plastic surgeons in the business. Such a man would expect his wife to be perfect — and why not? After all, he has spent enough hours in surgery to get her that way. But when his wife falls ill she turns her back on conventional medicine, and her arid marriage, and seeks help from the world of alternative medicine and a charismatic therapist who promises not just medical salvation. For Ransome, this is the ultimate betrayal. It defies logic, and Ross Ransome is a profoundly logical man. Logically, he can see no reason why any man should have his wife when he can't. It's all completely rational...

The Green Mile: those who walk it do not return, because at the end of that walk is the room in which sits Cold Mountain penitentiary's electric chair. In 1932 the newest resident on death row is John Coffey, a giant black man convicted of the brutal murder of two little girls. But nothing is as it seems with John Coffey, and around him unfolds a bizarre and horrifying story. Evil murderer or holy innocent — whichever he is — Coffey has strange powers which may yet offer salvation to others, even if they can do nothing to save him.

A freshly researched, exciting history of the hard fought wartime convoys to Russia, emphasising the bitter struggle to get material through and desperate attacks by German aircraft and U-boats to prevent it.

Charlie Gordon, IQ 68, is a floor sweeper, and the gentle butt of everyone's jokes, until an experiment in the enhancement of human intelligence turns him into a genius. But then Algernon, the mouse whose triumphal experimental tranformation preceded his, fades and dies, and Charlie has to face the possibility that his salvation was only temporary.

Glen Runciter is dead. Or is he? Someone died in the explosion orchestrated by his business rivals, but even as his funeral is scheduled, his mourning employees are receiving bewildering messages from their boss. And the world around them is warping and regressing in ways which suggest that their own time is running out. If it hasn't already.

At the beginning of his career, Philip K. Dick, whose later work won him widespread acclaim as the world's greatest sf writer, wrote a number of short novels which were published as paperback originals back-to-back in dual volumes with works by writers who were then more famous. Considerably more straightforward than his later novels, these stories are nevertheless unmistakably the work of the author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Ubik in their quirky exuberance and originality.

Ill luck made Roger Torraway the subject of the Man Plus Programe, but it was deliberate biological engineering which turned him into a monster — a machine perfectly adapted to survive on Mars. For according to computer predictions, Mars is humankind's only alternative to extinction. But beneath his monstrous exterior, Torraway still carries a man's capacity for suffering.

The fifth and final part of the complete collected stories shows Philip K. Dick at the very height of his outstanding powers. The twenty-five tales were written between 1963 and 1981, just a few months before he died, and include two stories which have been turned into box office smashes: the title story, filmed as Total Recall, and «The Little Black Box», which grew into his masterpiece Blade Runner.

The fourth in the Fantasy Masterworks series, the Dying Earth saga inspired writers like Michael Moorcock and Gene Wolfe, who freely acknowledges his debt to Vance in his own Book of the New Sun. Here, in one volume, is Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy Award-winning author Jack Vance's classic Dying Earth saga comprising The Dying Earth, The Eyes of the Overworld, Cugel's Saga and Rhialto the Marvellous. Travel to a far distant future, when the sun bleeds red in a dark sky, where magic and science is one, and the Earth has but a few short decades to live...

A classic Philip K Dick idea: the hero who keeps coming back from the dead — if he was ever alive at all. First, Gino Molinari was assassinated by a political Rival. Then he died of a heart attack. But now he is back, younger and more vigorous than ever, giving Earth new hope of survival in the war against the alien reegs. But is this really Molinari, or a robant masquerading as Earth's overlord? Whatever the truth, only he can save the Solar System — if he can stay alive long enough, or at least not stay dead for too long.

She was born Norma Jeane but the world knew and loved her as Marilyn. Her life was one of unprecedented fame and private misery, her death a tragedy surrounded by mysteries. Drawing on first-hand interviews Anthony Summers offers both a classic biography and a shockingly revealing account of the screen goddess's relations with John and Robert Kennedy. 'The definitive story of the legend... more convincing at every page — told with all the coldness of truth and the authority of the historian, but at the end of it we still love Marilyn' Maeve Binchy, Irish Times.

In this volume in the Lives series, Edna O'Brien relates how she shares a love for the music and precision of words with the writer she has seen as guru for all of her life.

In the year 2301, guns are only museum pieces and benign telepaths sweep the minds of the populace to detect crimes before they happen. In 2301 murder is virtually impossible, but one man is about to change that... Ben Reich, a psychopathic business magnate, has devised the ultimate scheme to eliminate the competition and destroy the order of his society. The Demolished Man is a masterpiece of imaginative suspense, set in a superbly imagined world in which everything has changed except the ancient instinct for murder.

Meet Karl Glogauer, time traveller and unlikely Messiah. When he finds himself in Palestine in the year 29AD he is shocked to meet the man known as Jesus Christ — a drooling idiot, hiding in the shadows of the carpenter's shop in Nazareth. But if he is not capable of fulfilling his historical role, then who will take his place?

A matchless display of Philip K. Dick's quirky, humorous, idiosyncratically philosophical world view. With one exception, all the stories of this volume were written over a nine-month period between 1951 and 1952, when Dick was making his first impact as a writer.

When Winston Niles Rumfoord flies his spaceship into a chrono-synclastic infundibulum he is converted into pure energy and only materializes when his waveforms intercept Earth or some other planet. As a result, he only gets home to Newport, Rhode Island, once every fifty-nine days and then only for an hour. But at least, as a consolation, he now knows everything that has ever happened and everything that ever will be. He knows, for instance, that his wife is going to Mars to mate with Malachi Constant, the richest man in the world. He also knows that on Titan — one of Saturn's moons — is an alien from the planet Tralfamadore, who has been waiting 200,000 years for a spare part for his grounded spacecraft...